1-54 New York 2023

Loft Art Gallery’s collective exhibition “Through the Looking Glass” features the work of four internationally-acclaimed artists: Walid Ardhaoui (Tunisia), Othmane Bengebara (Morocco), Saidou Dicko (Burkina Faso), and Mous Lamrabet (Belgium/Morocco). Their works explore reflections of desire and memory, visions of self and the world that surrounds us all.Images mirror our culture, projecting a reckoning of who we are in that moment, casting shadows, reaching through the glass to see into the past, or to reinvent the future.

Belgian-Moroccan photographer Mous Lamrabet explores futuristic fusion in images that confront perceptions of culture with explosive colour, joy, humour and empathy. The characters that emerge from his work go wherever they choose to go, and become whoever they choose to be. Gorgeous ethno-drapery and lunar landscapes, logos, hearts, flowers, and balloons take us on an exotic journey, sharing Lamrabet’s non-binary view of the world and our place within it, spreading his doctrine of inclusive diversity.

In psychological terms, the mirror often symbolizes the threshold between conscious perception and the unconscious mind.Tunisian artist Walid Ardhaoui navigates these territories, combining mature hyperrealism with euphoric schoolbook illustrations. His figures slip into unconsciousness as their memories/imagined utopias come alive, parachuting from airplanes, riding bareback on a giraffe. He reminds us to rediscover our original selves, to tap into the infinite possibilities of imagination.

Burkina Faso-born photographer/painter Saidou Dicko builds upon photographs of ordinary people, plunging them into inky silhouette, surrounding them with intricately-painted kaleidoscope patterns. His protagonists—identified with a Fulani cross, in reference to his own Sahelian origins—starkly contrast with these hand-painted interiors, suddenly transported to a Wonderland collage of texture and colour.

Moroccan artist/architect Othmane Bengebara delves into the mirror in a literal sense, using the reflective surface as medium. For the artist, whose recent works deal with introspection, colour represents moments of natural light transition. For the architect, the mirror medium is a tool for building interior spaces of self perception, block by block. Bengebara’s works crystalize the hour of waning light—from blue to deep blue to black—when a dog becomes indistinguishable from a wolf. Or the golden light of sunset and sunrise, and the compression of time between the two. When our visual perception gives way to awareness of self, and
infinite possibility. The golden light of Sunset and Sunrise speaks of the compression of life between the two, and the celestial body that is the source of all things.

 
-Kristi Jones